The Gallup Coal Strike of Nineteen Thirty-Five

In April of nineteen thirty-five, a labor dispute in the Gallup coal fields turned into one of the most violent episodes in New Mexico history, and one of the least remembered.

The Gallup American Coal Company had been at loggerheads with the United Mine Workers and an affiliated left-leaning union for months over wages, hours, and the company's practice of paying miners in scrip redeemable only at company stores. On April four, a confrontation at the Gallup jail over the arrest of a union organizer escalated into a gunfight. By the time it was over, the county sheriff, Mack Carmichael, was dead, two other men were wounded, and dozens of miners, most of them Mexican nationals or Mexican Americans, were in custody.

Governor Clyde Tingley declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard. What followed was a systematic deportation campaign. State and local authorities, working in cooperation with federal immigration officers, rounded up several hundred Mexican and Mexican American miners and expelled them across the border, invoking immigration law as a tool to break the union. Organizers, including Jesusita Martinez and several leaders of the National Miners Union, were charged with murder or deported without due process hearings.

Four miners were tried for the deputy's death. Three were convicted, then had their sentences commuted after years of protest from labor and civil liberties groups. The deportations, however, were never reversed. The episode illustrated how authorities in Depression-era New Mexico used ethnicity and immigration status as weapons against labor organizing, a pattern visible across the West during those years.

The Gallup strike left the coal industry in McKinley County fragmented and weakened. Within two decades, the rail companies had converted to diesel, the coal market collapsed, and the mines that had built the town were shuttered.